Friday, November 09, 2012

Coma

I'm sorry, I should be blogging about the economy, I know.

But the guys (my husband and my son) took our granddaughter out tonight and I wasn't feeling like an outing. It was about 30 minutes after they left that a second wind kicked in and just then, I ended up having a visitor. My friend and neighbor and she had heard I didn't feel like going out so she came with chicken soup and fun foods as well.

We ended up pulling up Netflix on the TV to look for something fun to watch.

Coma?

Probably not 'fun.' But we knew the 70s film. "They're putting people into comas," Genevieve Bujold realizes. She's a doctor. Michael Douglas is her boyfriend. People do not believe her.

But this was a mini-series. Starring Lauren Ambrose in the Bujold role. Only now, Susan is a medical student and not a doctor. She was very good. James Woods was surprisingly good. I'm not a huge fan but he was really good. We also like Geena Davis and Richard Dreyfuss and Ellen Burstyn. And agreed that Steven Pasquale was as hot today (as the love interst) as Michael Douglas was in the 70s.

It was a really good remake. It added things and was spooky and just so much better than most of the remakes.

For comparison, let me off The Omen. The only thing that made the remake for me was Mia Farrow. She was so good as the evil nanny that I would rate the film highly. But so few others are even worth watching. Even when they remake a bad film, the remake seems stupid.

And I love Jamie Lee Curtis so I love the films she does, the two Halloween sequels for her. But both of those films were lacking.

But this was a great remake. It treated the viewers like adults. It didn't dumb it down.

I loved this. It's two-parts because it's a mini-series. If you can stream it on Netflix, do so. My friend says she saw it at Redbox and almost rented it so you can check there too.

Thursday, November 8, 2012. Chaos and violence continue, Dan Murphy
hates spokespersons but loves War Starters, the World Bank sniffs around
Iraq, the Ministry of Oil announces new deals, the BRussells Tribunal
accuses Moqtada al-Sadr, and more.

Let's start with Dan Murphy -- and sadly I don't mean Soul Asylum. No, we're talking about world class liar Dan Murphy. The Christian Science Monitor
needs to declare him a columnist -- not a good one either -- and he's
about as honest as William Safire was. But on the left we're supposed
to cheer because he lies for 'our side.' He writes crap that reads like, "I have the hots for Campbell Brown but Dan Senor married her so I hate his guts."

What the election says to nit-wit Dan Murphy is that another Dan (Senor)
will have "no more influence in the White House today than he did
yesterday." Dan Senor advised Mitt Romney and Dan Senor is evil, evil,
evil. Dan The Nit Wit Murphy explains, "Mr. Senor was a key political
player for the Bush administration in Iraq after the 2003 invasion,
advising Paul Bremer
on how to run the country in 2003 and 2004." I would ask, "How does
this crap make it into print" -- but crap like this is why the Christian Science Monitor is no longer a daily paper.

Dan Senor may be many things. I casually know Campbell Brown, I do not
know Dan Senor. And I remember being surprised by that pairing and
being told that Dan's basically media anyway. Meaning he's PR. That's
something I heard repeatedly over the years. Yet Murphy's explaining
that Senor was basically running the CPA. How strange because I spent
hours, during the Iraqi Inquiry, pouring over each day's testimony, on
the phone with friends who were covering the Inquiry or who were
attending it for other reasons, and never did I encounter Dan Senor's
name. Paul Bremer? Over and over. Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi
Rice, generals, etc and etc. No Dan Senor. But Dan Murphy wants us to
know that "Senor was a key political player for the Bush administration
in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, advising Paul Bremer on how to run the
country in 2003 and 2004."

Senor is the former spokesman for the American government in Iraq
(the Coalition Provisional Authority at the beginning of the Iraq war
under George W. Bush) and is a particularly close adviser to Romney on
the Middle East.

Oh, he was a spokesperson. Yeah, that jibes with what I was told years
ago. It also goes with what's been reported over and over and over.
Now unless I'm remembering wong -- and I can be wrong and often am -- Dahr Jamail's Beyond The Green Zone: Dispatches From An Unembedded Journalist In Occupied Iraq
mentions Dan Senor on exactly one page. Now I haven't picked up the
book in years (not an insult, it's a great book, I recommend it highly)
but I believe that's page 68, I'm seeing it in my mental picture as
bottom of that page and the sentence starts "Coalition spokesman Dan
Senor . . ."

Am I wrong on that? Could be but don't think so.

So a spokesperson is what we're talking about. And Dan Murphy's
inflated him to what? Cabinet-level planner of the Iraq War? He's as
nutty as the other partisan Democrats passing talking points off as
facts and he's certainly not a journalist.

Dan Murphy refers you to a piece US House Rep Adam Smith wrote for Foreign Policyabout
how 24 foreign policy advisers to Romney worked in the Bully Boy Bush
administration. That's shocking? Like it's shocking that so many of
the Clinton White House people quickly drifted to Barack or Hillary in
2007 and 2008?

Dan Senor's not mentioned in Adam Smith's article. But Senor's the topic
of Murphy's first four paragraphs and a photo of Senor (with Paul Ryan)
is used to illustrate the article. Dan Senor was a spokesperson. Dan
Murphy needs to dial back the crazy.

Really? I kind of think it's starts with reporters or 'reporters' who
think they can lie and distort. What the hell did Dan Senor do to rate
him being called out the day after the election? And that question from
someone who doesn't say "The Iraq War was wrong." Hell no. I say the
Iraq War is a criminal war. Not wrong, criminal.

But even more reason for calling out Murphy's crap is Howard LaFranchi's garabage
today that's Howard basically saying, 'I jizzed my shorts, I'm so
happy!' Over what? Over Colin Powell possibly joining the
administration in Barack's second term.

Oh. Okay. The rag calls out Dan Senor who was a spokesperson but it gets giddy over Collie The Blot Powell?
The man who lied to the United Nations, who helped sell the damn war?
There are no ethics and there are no standards, that is painfully clear.

I realize that when it comes to the press, no one gives head like
Colin. Please, I saw him stab Bush I in the back to journalists in the
mid-90s. He was entertaining three on background two tables over. No
one self-promotes better than Colin Powell. The term "press whore" was
invented to define him.

But if you're going to call out someone for being a spokesperson for the
US government in Iraq then you damn well can't applaud the person who
stood before the United Nations spouting one lie after another to
justify an illegal war.

And before Dan Murphy whines that he was talking about neocons and how
they won't be advising Barack, grab a damn clue with both hands. From the October 24th snapshot:

Barack's had necons throughout his administration. We regularly call
out Victoria Nuland who is better known as Mrs. Robert Kagan and who is
even better known as Dick Cheney's National Security Adivsor (2003 to
2005). In February 2011, whistle blower Sibel Edmonds (Boiling Frogs) noted
some of the many neocons serving in Barack's administration: Marc
Grossman, Dennis Ross and Frederick Kagan (that would be Victoria
Nuland's brother-in-law). In 2010, Kristine Frazao (Russia Today -- link is video and text) thought
Kagan's addition was so important, she did a report on just that,
opening with, "They're ba-a-a-ck! The US government may be done with
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld but another neoconservative is returning
to the government payroll. That same year, Allen McDuffee (ThinkTanked) observed,
"Because we overinflated the impact of neoconservatives during the Bush
administration and paid little attention to them before that, we're
missing the fact that neocons are having the same influence in the Obama
administration they've always had, according to a report issued by the
Brookings Institution." And if we drop back another year, we can land on

This morning leading neoconservatives such as William Kristol and
Robert Kagan held a meeting at the Mayflower Hotel -- in support of
President Obama's Afghanistan policy. Kristol and Kagan, as Foreign
Policy's Laura Rozen has reported,
have formed a successor organization to the Project for the New
American Century, which came into disrepute for its advocacy of the Iraq
War. The new one is called the Foreign Policy Initiative. Its
contention is that America remains, in the words of Madeleine Albright,
the "indispensable nation"and, furthermore, that neocons can play a
valuable role in coming years in ensuring that it remains one.

Is there a charitable interpretation of much of the left's silence
about Barack Obama's war policies? Either they don't know about them,
they don't care about them or they find building the welfare state a
more urgent cause than dismantling the warfare state. Maybe they assume
he wouldn't be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate if he weren't a peacemakrer?
You can suggest other interpretations in the comments.

Nevertheless, while Barack Obama built a name for himself on his 2002
opposition to the Iraq War (as a state senator out of Hyde Park,
Chicago, mind you, where supporting the Iraq War would have been
political suicide), he made it clear on the campaign trail he wasn't a
non-interventionist. He promised if there was information on Osama bin
Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan and the Pakistani government didn't act
on it, he would. You couldn't get through the campaign season without
hearing at least one Obama booster (or even the president himself)
trumpeting that kept promise. Ending the war in Iraq was another promise
Obama ran on in 2008. He claims he's kept it and campaigned on ending
the Iraq war. Obama, of course, actually tried to renege on the status of forces agreement negotiated under President Bush and extend the war in Iraq.

Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could
result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on
training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to
General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently
deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with
intelligence.

When host Joe Scarborough raised the criticism on his show Scarborough Country on October 23, 2012
that Obama's drone attacks are killing a lot of innocents, including 4
year old children, guest Joe Klein, Time Magazine's political columnist,
an ardent Obama partisan, defended the drone attacks with these words:

"the bottom line in the end is - whose
4-year-old get killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility
that 4-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror."

Whose 4-year-old gets killed? This stunningly naked xenophobic and
reactionary statement by Joe Klein topped an earlier comment of his in
this same show in which he described the virtue of drone warfare:

KLEIN: It has been remarkably successful" --

SCARBOROUGH: "at killing people" –

KLEIN: "At decimating bad people, taking out a lot of bad people -
and saving Americans lives as well, because our troops don't have to do
this . . . You don't need pilots any more because you do it with a
joystick in California."

This is one of the most prominent political columnists in America
speaking, an ardent Democratic supporter: "You don't need pilots anymore
because you do it with a joystick in California."

A couple of days ago, the Baghdad Operations Headquarter stated that
they found the remains of tens of Iraqi academics that were kidnapped
from the Ministry of Higher Education – Department of Missions -in 14
November 2006.They were buried in the Al-Sada Area in Sadr City. The
bodies were found after one of the militia members (who is arrested by
the Iraqi authorities) confessed and told about the place where the
victims were buried, their number, the details of how the militias
carried out the kidnapping, why they did it and who is behind all this.
(2)

The Iraqi people always ask themselves when such "incidents" occur,
like a kidnapping or a blast or a car bomb:"who is behind this?"

Everyone in Iraq knows that the Ministry of Higher Education
kidnapping was the work of sectarian militias, more specifically the
ones that are politically linked to the government.

When the Iraqi people ask about the names of these militias, and the
reasons behind the secrecy of the Iraqi government, theyare surprised
that no one wants to talk and no one dares to name names.The Iraqi
government,the Army, the Ministry of Interior, the Parliament
members,the human rights organizations, even the TV channels and
media,all of them avoid to mention the names of those militias as if it
was a sacred talisman or a taboo!

Do these militias consider the blood of their victims as the cheapest thing in the world, and are their crimes all sacred?

Everyone knows that the Al-Mahdi Militia, led by Muqtada Al-Sadr, is
among those who committed such disgusting crimes. Some of the media
dared to mention the details of this crime saying that Hakim Al-Zamili,
one of the leaders of the Al-Mahdi Militia,was responsible for this
crime that took the lives of more than 150 Iraqis, some of them Iraq's
best academics. Al-Zamili is a prominent member of the Iraqi Parliament,
representative of the Al-Sadr Party. Many Iraqis know it, but the
government and parliament representatives keep silent and never mention
the name of the murderers of the academics in November 2006.

The United States government caused the violence. Car bombings did not
roll Iraq prior to the US invasion. They continued to cause it even
after Bully Boy Bush left the White House. By refusing to honor the
election results, by backing Nouri al-Maliki for a second term as prime
minister even though his State of Law came in second. They didn't just
back him during the eight month political stalemate when he refused to
allow the winner of the election to form a government, no, the United
States also negotiated a contract: The Erbil Agreement. Weary political
blocs, desperate to end the stalemate went along with contractual
promises.

Nouri made various concessions in the contract and the political blocs
agreed he could have a second term as prime minister. The US brokered
the contract and promised that it was legal, binding and that it would
have the full support of the US government. Nouri used it to become
prime minister and then refused to honor the contract. He took what he
wanted and then broke the contract. And the US government that had
sworn they would back this contract acted like they'd never heard of the
Erbil Agreement.

When votes don't matter, when the Iraqi Constitution doesn't matter, you
not only destroy faith in any prospect of democracy, you also set up an
illegitimate government that does not have any authority. That breeds
violence and it also ensures that the political stalemate continues.

All Iraq News notes that the talk is President Jalal Talabani is reportedly going to try another attempt to address the political crisis. Wael Grace (Al Mada) reports
there was a push in Parliament to limit the three presidencies to two
terms. The three presidencies are the posts of President of Iraq, Prime
Minister of Iraq and Speaker of Parliament. This move is, in part, to
prevent Nouri al-Maliki from having a third term. Jalal Talabani is
also serving a second term. Grace notes that Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc
favors the limitation and has spoken publicly previously about how it is
needed to avoid a new dictatorship from emerging in Iraq. As was to be
expected, State of Law stamped their feet and said no such law was
needed and they worry about the legality.

State of Law is 'known' for respecting the Constitution. (That was
sarcasm.) As further proof of their lack of respect for the law, Alsumaria reports
that State of Law MP Abbas al-Bayati is stating that State of Law feels
the solution for disputed Kirkuk is for it to become an 'independent'
province. He's a liar. First off, the Constitution addresses this in
Article 140. Nouri has refused to implement Article 140. Second,
they're not suggesting something like the KRG that is semi-autonomous.
They're saying it's a province. One of many provinces in Iraq. It
will not be independent, no more so than any other province that is not
in the Kurdistan Regional Government. What that means is the the issue
was not resolved -- as outlined in the Constitution -- by a referendum
and census but instead Kirkuk would become part of the central
government out of Baghdad. Kirkuk is oil rich. It is disputed for that
reason. It is also disputed because of its history with various groups
claiming they were displaced at various points in history. The
Constitution addressed this because it is a serious dispute. That's why
Article 140 was written. State of Law continues to subvert and ignore
the Constitution. This is how the second place political slate that the
US put into place again in 2010 rules Iraq and sews tension and
distrust when not breeding violence.

Meanwhile AP reports that the Ministry of Oil has announced a deal with Bashneft. Russian Oil Net describes
Bashneft as "the unique large Russian oil company which is not
incorporating oil refining factories. [. . .] The production
association 'Bashneft' has been created in 1932. In January, 1995 the
production association has been renamed to open joint-stock company
'Bashneft'. As a result of privatization about 63 % of actions remained
in the Republic Bashkortostan property, 28,3 % have been distributed on
the closed subscription among the labor collective, 5 % have got the
administration." AFP notes
the contract is with Premier Oil as well as Bashneft and "Under the
contract, the two firms must invest at least $120 million to explore the
8,000-square-kilometre (3,100 square mile) block covering the provinces
of Muthanna and Najaf in south Iraq." The British company describes itself on its website,
"Premier is a growing FTSE 250 oil and gas exploration and production
company with current interests in eight countries around the world." Live Trading News notes
that yesterday the Ministry of oil issued an announcement, "The Iraqi
Oil Ministry signed the final service contract with a consortium
comprising Russia's Lukoil and Japan's Inpex to explore for oil reserves
in Iraq's southern provinces of Muthanna and Dhi-Qar."

While it can make oil deals it can't rebuild the country for the people. AFP reports
that Iraq's "investment chief" Sami al-Araji declared today that $1
trillion was needed to rebuild the country over "the next 10 years" and
that oil will not be enough, "some [money] will have to come from
foreign and domestic direct investment." This as the World Bank is sure
that Iraq can start providing it with money. Dina al-Shibeeb (Al Arabiya) reports:

Deputy head of Iraq's Central Bank said last week that the World Bank asked Iraq to become a donor state by 2014.

But with the myriad challenges facing a country ravaged by years of
war, Iraq is likely still far from being able to help others. "Poverty
is still rife in Iraq. Iraq continues to be a potential conflict zone.
There are regular bombings in the country," Paul Sullivan, professor of
economics at the National Defense University (NDU), told Al Arabiya. Sullivan,
also an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University,
added that while Iraq needs to rebuild its infrastructure, education,
health and more, "Iraqis do have a pile of oil revenues sitting around,
but poor governance, corruption, weak rule of law and more militate
against the proper use of it."He said "the World Bank is less than clueless if they think Iraq is ready to be a donor state."

Iraq has more than enough money to take care of Iraqis if it cared to do
that. But you've got a government that dreams parading across the
world stage while taking a lot of the public's money and putting it into
their own personal pockets. For that reason more than anything else,
the Iraqi government wants money from other countries. If the US
goverment provides it -- and it currently does -- people in government
(besides just Senator John Kerry and his Senate Foreign Relations
Committee) need to grasp that this is a tool of soft power. For months,
the White House whined about wanting Iranian planes searched that were
enroute to Syria. Only after Kerry and the Committee stated publicly
that money could be cut did Nouri al-Maliki order the searching of the
planes. The answer that Barack (like Bush before him) repeatedly falls
back on is "war." There are many other levers of power. It's a shame
even the US Ambassador to the United Nations was unaware of that but
Susan Rice is a crazed War Hawk as well as public joke.

The decision was made to not try terror suspects in federal courts.
Terror suspects believed to have been involved in the 9/11 attacks and
others imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, which Obama failed to close, are
now going through a military tribunal process—a second-class justice
system where one is not allowed to testify in court about torture
experienced at the hands of CIA interrogators because the government
claims it controls the thoughts and memories of detainees.

Warrantless surveillance escalated sharply under Obama. The ACLU obtained
Justice Department documents that showed federal law enforcement
agencies were "increasingly monitoring Americans' electronic
communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or
meaningful accountability." Now, the Supreme Court is deciding whether
to hear a challenge
against the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which allowed
telecommunications companies to be granted retroactive immunity for
warrantless wiretapping under Bush. The act also allowed for the
expansion of dragnet surveillance. Obama Justice Department lawyers have
argued it does not have to tell plaintiffs challenging the law they
have been unlawfully monitored and, even if they did violate their
privacy, it would not matter because the surveillance state is here to
stay.

Obama refused to prosecute war criminals. Not a single person was
prosecuted and convicted of torture. Even though he signed an executive
order as president that prohibited "enhanced interrogation techniques"
used under Bush, torture was effectively decriminalized.
The "state secrets" privilege was invoked when torture victims tried to
sue government for torture, effectively preventing justice. Moreover,
former CIA agent John Kiriakou was prosecuted for allegedly leaking the
name of a covert officer, who had been a kidnapper in the CIA's
Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. It was believed that
various individuals in human rights organizations knew this officer's
identity, and it was largely suspected the government was prosecuting
Kiriakou because he was one of the first in government to say on
television the CIA had an official policy of torture while Bush was
president. The prosecution destroyed his life, took a tremendous toll on
his wife and his five children so he ended up taking a plea deal.